Audio

From crashing test flights to close air support and strategic bombing – on the breakneck innovation in aerial warfare over the course of WW1. An issue with some implications today, you’ll agree?

It could be argued that World War I was decided at sea. The British blockade; the Germans try unrestricted submarine warfare, and massive consequences follow. We talk about Jutland, Skaggerak, the Luistania, and civilian hardships, in the war at sea.

Among the many changes wrought by WW1 was an irrevocable change in the status of women. “Munitions girls”, women running the Paris Metro and the buses in London, policewomen and auxilaries. We conclude with some notes on a conscription crisis in Canada that also played a role in women getting the vote.

The conditions may not have been optimal but they didn’t look to be getting better – so the Irish Revolutionaries made their move in Easter 1916. A week of urban warfare followed – the revolutionaries lost – but they succeeded in transforming the Irish question forever and setting the nation on the inevitable road to independence.

The battles of Verdun, the Somme, and the Brusilov Offensive. Epic, tragic military errors, horrors of trenches, battles that killed hundreds of thousands and changed the course of history.

Genocides happen in broad daylight – it is only afterwards that they are covered up. There are still fewer countries that recognize the Armenian Genocide than countries that do not. We read scholars that take the view that it was a genocide as well as a scholar that describes the events without using the label, presenting the story of 1915-1916 as well as the trial of the leaders after the war. One scholar of the genocide says that by refusing to investigate these events enough, “society has lost its moral sensitivity to past genocide as well as to current and possibly future episodes of mass violence.”

In desperation, the European empires turn to the people they’ve colonized and press them into sacrificing their lives for their imperial masters, setting off a chain of events that makes decolonization in a few decades inevitable.